How Will Weight Loss Drugs Affect Obesity Stigma?

Oprah Winfrey recently described her lifelong struggles with weight to People magazine this way: "I have been blamed and shamed, and I blamed and shamed myself." She further explained that at times when she was brutally criticized for being overweight, she felt sad rather than angry because she accepted that it was her fault. Clearly, the stigma of obesity has traumatizing effects on those who live with it.

None of this information will surprise readers. We are all familiar with the pattern of assuming that weight problems are a function of shortcomings of individuals, such as lack of willpower, poor diet, and an unwillingness to exercise. But why are we so sure that these are the causes of obesity?

For decades, social psychologists have been examining the way we make decisions about causes. It is apparent that people spend a good deal of time trying to understand the social world, and we do so in part by coming to conclusions about what caused this or that to happen.

Research has revealed that when human beings make causal attributions, they have a preference for assuming that people’s behavior, or the plight they find themselves in, is due to something about them, often their character, rather than being a result of circumstances or bad luck. This tendency is so common that it was named the fundamental attribution error.

We can easily think of examples of this tendency in our daily lives: He got lung cancer because he smoked. She’s poor because she doesn’t work hard enough. That classmate turned in a bad paper because he’s lazy.

Why do we do this? A number of theories could explain the phenomenon. The person is more salient to us than is the situation; that is, the person stands out in our perception. For example, I see the student who handed in the bad paper, but I don’t see him visiting his sick parent in the hospital. Thus, it does not occur to me that difficult circumstances are affecting his performance.

Plus, it is comforting to believe that we live in a just world in which bad things only happen to those who did something to deserve their fate. That way, we don’t have to acknowledge that something terrible could happen to us through no fault of our own.

There are also cultural factors. The U.S. and many other Western countries value individualism, which views the individual as an independent entity and emphasizes individual responsibility and the idea that persons should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Their citizens are prone to making attributions that blame the individual. Research documents that this cultural difference is quite evident in regard to perceptions of obesity. Americans tend to have particularly negative attitudes toward the overweight when they blame the individual for the problem.

What is the result of these victim-blaming causal attributions? Extensive research indicates that when we blame someone for their plight, both our emotions and actions are affected. Specifically, we are likely to experience little sympathy and perhaps some anger, and we are unlikely to want to help the person. These outcomes are obviously not pleasant for the blamed person. And they have very real consequences in that people hesitate to make charitable donations to solve problems that are considered personally controllable. As one study demonstrated, we are more likely to contribute to curing Alzheimer’s than obesity even if the latter is killing more people.

Fortunately, new information can change the way issues are framed, and that seems to be happening in the case of the problem of obesity. The longstanding American belief that obesity is the fault of the individual is being challenged by new weight-loss drugs that have become all the rage. These drugs are shifting the narrative about obesity from a willpower problem to a biological one.

Though it is too early to tell what effects this change will have on society, it is likely that the shame associated with being overweight will decline. When something is out of one’s personal control, it is generally not stigmatized. What a relief to the roughly 40% of Americans who live with obesity. In Oprah's words, having a medical solution to the problem “feels like relief, like redemption, like a gift, and not something to hide behind and once again be ridiculed for.”